Sometimes a timely look back can provide perspective to make a safer path forward. On this day in 1954, the first field trials of the polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk began in an elementary school in McLean, Virginia. Polio is now an almost forgotten concern, almost like times before the iPhone and Internet. It has not been entirely eradicated, however, and cases still occur occasionally even here in the U.S.
The disease, poliomyelitis, is hinted at in history records, but reached epidemic levels around the beginning of the Twentieth Century, reaching 58,000 new cases in the U.S. in 1952 and killing 3000. It affected children most severely, and those it didn’t kill often suffered paralysis and deformity. FDR was perhaps the most famous victim. I remember myself tales from my parents and theirs of what we now call social distancing during the Summer months when outbreaks of polio were most common.
Dr. Jonas Salk worked in the 1940s on flu vaccines before turning to address polio. His process was to kill the virus and then inject it into the bloodstream, which prompted a person’s immune system to develop antibodies against the disease. Famously, he tested his vaccine on himself and his family.
The 1954 trial involved testing the vaccine or a placebo on about two million school children. A year later, vaccinations began involving the public. Surprisingly, some of the recipients contracted polio, leading to the withdrawal of the vaccine. It turned out that about 100,000 doses of the vaccine contained the live polio virus. More rigorous vaccine testing and controls followed, but the vaccination rate took time to grow. In 1957, there were still 6000 cases of polio in the U.S. The advent of the Sabin oral version of the vaccine in 1961 did much to bring polio to its figurative knees.
Polio still exists today, sixty-five years later, in places in the world, even though it is eradicable, since it is only spread from human to human. The telling history lesson from its story, however, is how long a miracle cure can take to be developed for a disease and how missteps can occur in the rush to make it available.
I am not qualified as an epidemiologist, much less as a medical doctor, but then neither are many of television’s talking heads or those in positions of power who spout talk of curing the coronavirus by injecting disinfectants. Even if later claimed to be in jest, such comments are in bad taste (sorry), could cause harm to the foolish or unsuspecting, and perhaps worst, perpetuate false hopes that the coronavirus affecting us now will go away readily and soon.
Even the best benefits from science take patience, testing and time. In the meantime, perhaps we should all consider the past, care for those we can and protect everyone by preventing the spread of the latest of history’s pestilences.
Update: On May 21, the New York Times published a cautionary article on the difficulties in and hazards of hurried vaccine development. That is not to imply that haste is not urgent, but one word of caution should suffice: Hydroxychloroquine.
